Malick's films have been noted for exploring themes such as individual transcendence, nature, and conflicts between reason and instinct. They are typically marked by broad philosophical and spiritual overtones, as well as the use of meditative voice-overs from individual characters. The stylistic elements of the director's work have inspired divided opinions among film scholars and audiences; some praised his films for their cinematography and aesthetics, while others found them lacking in plot and character development. His first five films have nonetheless ranked highly in retrospective decade-end and all-time polls.

Malick's first feature-length work as a director was Badlands, an independent film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on a crime spree in the 1950s Midwest. It was influenced by the crimes of convicted teenage spree killer Charles Starkweather. Malick raised half of the budget by approaching people outside of the industry, including doctors and dentists, and by contributing $25,000 from his personal savings. The rest was raised by executive producer Edward R. Pressman.[19][20] After a troubled production that included many crew members leaving halfway through the shoot, Badlands drew raves upon its premiere at the New York Film Festival. As a result, Warner Bros. bought distribution rights for three times its budget.[21]

Malick's second film was the Paramount-produced Days of Heaven, about a love triangle that develops in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century. Production began in the fall of 1976 in Alberta, Canada. The film was mostly shot during the magic hour, with primarily natural light. Much like Malick's first feature, Days of Heaven had a lengthy and troubled production, with several members of the production crew quitting before shooting was finished, mainly due to disagreements over Malick's idiosyncratic directorial style.[22] The film likewise had a troubled post-production phase, as Billy Weber and Malick spent two years editing, during which they experimented with unconventional editing and voice-over techniques once they realized the picture they had set out to make would not fully work.[23]

Days of Heaven was finally released in 1978 to mostly positive responses from critics.[24][25] Its cinematography was widely praised, although some found its story lackluster.[26][27] In The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote that it "is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film."[28] However, it later won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and the prize for Best Director at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. Days of Heaven has since grown in stature,[29] having been voted one of the 50 greatest American films ever made in a 2015 critics' poll published by BBC.[30]

Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick began developing a project for Paramount, titled Q, that explored the origins of life on earth. During pre-production, he suddenly moved to Paris and disappeared from public view for years.[31] During this time, he wrote a number of screenplays, including The English Speaker, about Josef Breuer's analysis of Anna O.; adaptations of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose;[31] a script about Jerry Lee Lewis; and a stage adaptation of the Japanese film Sansho the Bailiff which was to be directed by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, in addition to continuing work on the Q script.[32] Although Q has never been made, Malick's work for the project provided material for his later film The Tree of Life[33] and eventually became the basis for Voyage of Time. Jack Fisk, a longtime production designer on the director's films, said that Malick was shooting film during this time as well.[34]

After learning of Malick's work on an article about Che Guevara during the 1960s, Steven Soderbergh offered Malick the chance to write and direct a film about Guevara that he had been developing with Benicio del Toro. Malick accepted and produced a screenplay focused on Guevara's failed revolution in Bolivia.[44] After a year and a half, the financing had not come together entirely, and Malick was given the opportunity to direct The New World,[45] a script he had begun developing in the 1970s.[46] He left the Guevara project in March 2004,[45] and Soderbergh took over as director, leading to the film Che (2008). The New World, which featured a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas in the Virginia Colony, was released in 2005. Over one million feet of film were shot, and three different cuts of varying lengths were released.

While the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, critical reception was divided throughout its theatrical run; many praised its visuals and acting while finding its narrative unfocused.[47] However, The New World was later named by five critics as one of the best films of its decade,[48] and appeared in 39th place on a 2016 BBC poll of the greatest films since 2000.[49]

Over time, The Tree of Life's critical standing improved; Malick scholars Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston wrote that it became "arguably [Malick's] most acclaimed work".[52] It was voted the 79th greatest American film of all time in a 2015 BBC Culture poll of 62 international film critics.[53] The work was also ranked the seventh-greatest film since 2000 in a worldwide critics' poll by BBC.[49]

To the Wonder had its world premiere at the 69th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2012, and opened theatrically in the United States on April 12, 2013. Critical response to the film was markedly divided, and the work has been described as "arguably [Malick's] most derided".[52]

On November 1, 2011, Filmnation Entertainment announced international sales for Malick's next two projects: Lawless (now titled Song to Song) and Knight of Cups. Both films feature large ensemble casts, with many of the actors crossing over into both films. The films were shot back-to-back in 2012, with Song to Song primarily shot in Austin, Texas, and Knight of Cups in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.[57]

During the weekend of September 16, 2011, Malick and a small crew were seen filming Christian Bale and Haley Bennett at the Austin City Limits Music Festival as part of preliminary shooting for Song to Song.[58] Malick was also seen directing Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara at the Fun Fun Fun Fest on November 4, 2011.[58][59]

Concurrent with these two features, Malick continued work on an IMAX documentary that examines the birth and death of the known universe, titled Voyage of Time. The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a celebration of the Earth, displaying the whole of time, from the birth of the universe to its final collapse." The film is the culmination of a project that Malick has been working on for over forty years, and has been described by Malick himself as "one of my greatest dreams".[66] The film features footage shot by Malick and collaborators over the years, and expands on the footage that special effects luminaries Douglas Trumbull (2001) and Dan Glass (The Matrix) created for The Tree of Life.

Speaking about the film in a Q&A in Princeton, New Jersey, Malick said that, compared with his more recent films, with Radegund he had "repented and gone back to working with a much tighter script."[73]

Malick's films have been noted by critics for their philosophical themes.[81] According to film scholar Lloyd Michaels, the director's primary themes include "the isolated individual's desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road".[81] He named Days of Heaven as one in a group of acclaimed films from the 1970s that were intended to revolutionize the American film epic. Like The Godfather films, 1975's Nashville, and The Deer Hunter (1978), Michaels argued that the movie delves into "certain national myths" as an idiosyncratic type of Western, "particularly the migration westward, the dream of personal success, and the clash of agrarian and industrial economies".[82]Roger Ebert considered Malick's body of work to have a unifying common theme: "Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world."[83] In Ebert's opinion, Malick is among the few remaining directors who yearn "to make no less than a masterpiece".[84] While reviewing The Tree of Life, New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared the director to innovative "homegrown romantics" such as the writers Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, James Agee, and Herman Melville, in the sense that their "definitive writings" also "did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time" but nonetheless "leaned perpetually into the future, pushing their readers forward toward a new horizon of understanding".[85]

Malick's body of work has inspired polarizing opinions. According to Michaels, "few American directors have inspired such adulation and rejection with each successive film" as Malick. Michaels said that in all of American cinema, Malick is the filmmaker most frequently "granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work".[82] Malick makes use of broad philosophical and spiritual overtones, such as in the form of meditative voice-overs from individual characters. Some critics felt these elements made the films engaging and unique while others found them pretentious and gratuitous, particularly in his post-hiatus work.[86] Michaels believed the opinions Days of Heaven continues to elicit among scholars and film enthusiasts is exemplary of this: "The debate continues to revolve around what to make of 'its extremeties of beauty', whether the exquisite lighting, painterly compositions, dreamy dissolves, and fluid camera movements, combined with the epic grandeur and elegiac tone, sufficiently compensate for the thinness of the tale, the two-dimensionality of the characters, and the resulting emotional detachment of the audience."[82]Reverse Shot journalist Chris Wisniewski regarded both Days of Heaven and The New World not as "literary nor theatrical" but "principally cinematic" in their aesthetic, intimating narrative, emotional, and conceptual themes through the use of "image and sound" instead of "foregrounding dialogue, events or characters". He highlighted Malick's use of "rambling philosophical voiceovers; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music".[87]

While the common conception of Malick as a recluse is inaccurate,[88][89][90] he is nevertheless famously protective of his private life.[91] His contracts stipulate that his likeness may not be used for promotional purposes, and he routinely declines requests for interviews.[31][92]

From 1970 to 1976, Malick was married to Jill Jakes.[93] His companion afterward in the late 1970s was director and screenwriter Michie Gleason.[93] In 1985 in France, he married[93] Michèle Marie Morette,[94][95] whom he met in Paris in 1980; in 1996, Malick asked for a divorce, which was granted.[93][95] Afterward he married Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace, his high-school sweetheart.[96]

Malick's semi-autobiographic film To the Wonder was inspired by his relationships with Morette and Wallace.[14][97]

^Hill, Derek (2008). "The Movie Brats: Hollywood Regeneration". Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion Into the American New Wave. Oldcastle Books. ISBN184243392X.

^ abBarnett, Christopher B.; Elliston, Clark J., eds. (2016). "Preface". Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick. Routledge. ISBN1317588274. Retrieved January 30, 2017. The New World encountered a split reception upon its release in 2005. And yet, as will be mentioned later, the film has grown in stature with time ... Malick followed The Tree of Life, arguably his most acclaimed film, with To the Wonder, arguably his most derided one ... It is too early, then, to analyze the reception of Knights of Cups, though early indications are that, like To the Wonder, critical response will be wildly inconsistent.

^Thomson, David (September 1, 2011). "Is Days of Heaven the most beautiful film ever made?". The Guardian. Retrieved December 6, 2016. "It was said in the press that he had disappeared, that he was a recluse who declined to become a public personality. I met him in the 90s and it turned out that there was nothing reclusive about him."

^ abBlackall, Luke (May 24, 2011). "The secret life of Terrence Malick". The Independent. UK. Archived from the original on June 15, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2013. Michele Morette, his late ex-wife of 13 years, revealed that while they were together she wasn't allowed into his office, and that he would rather buy her a copy of a book than lend her his own.

Crofts, Charlotte. 'From the "Hegemony of the Eye" to the "Hierarchy of Perception": The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven', Journal of Media Practice, 2:1, 2001, 19–29.